[olivierduval]

The problem is not "ads" per se... it's engagement focus

Ads or clickbait posts or filtering/ordering algorithms are just some consequences of engagement focus (also called "attention economy" because what matters is... well... attention... measured by "engagement")

As long as focus is on "engagement" and not on "quality content", you'll have some Twitter/Facebook/Tiktok/... clone.

Subscriptions COULD shift the focus on quality (because if people are convinced that you provide quality content, they might pay for it) but it requires (as shown for a long time) at least : - easy way to discover real quality content (a bit like Wikipedia in a way) - easy way to pay once to subscribe to different providers. That's the same old problem for the newspapers: people dont want to pay a yearly subscription - or even a newspaper issue - to read once a single article. They MAY pay a subscription if they can read any article in any newspaper (in a big bag of newspaper). Then this revenue has to be redistributed among the different newspapers...